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- OP is impatient and wants to vent his irritation that he cannot get a refund this very instant (tough luck broski. Where I live if you cancel a purchase online you get to wait +21days till your money gets sent back.)
- People ignorantly/naively that no XP support was an intentional choice by Kerberos - which in part it was, but not to lessen customerbase, as much as make the end result prettier (and more current, see the "Microsoft has tried to put XP in the grave for years now threads/comments"). DX10 is easier to work with, produces much more current results (Oh noes - the gaem looks so dated, omg omg refund *slaptothegroin*), and if anything you should point your discontent at Microsoft for not making DirectX10 XP compatible to begin with, or even provide the unofficial workarounds that are in use today (as piss poor as they are in terms of performance)
- Yawn, another "rage rage, people discuss things they know nothing about" threads.

Nothing to see here, unless you want to troll/rage. For the rest of you, sit back, enjoy the ride and play some SOTS while Kerberos desperatly tries to salvage the game.

I always find it ironic when ppl troll threads and then say things like "nothing to see here unless you want to troll/rage"

Financially Sound to develop the game.
NOT financially sound enough to break delivery contracts and pay the penalties. Penalty clauses can be large.

But who would those contracts have been with? Paradox? Paradox cannot really afford this kind of publicity hit either. They are already fighting a pervasive problem of people staying clear of their games for moths or even years after release. That really really hurts the sales figures.

Who else would they be contractually obligated to that they would have to listen to? A bank will work with you, any other company (say a marketing company (even though I saw little marketing)) will definitely work with you.

Its always darkest right before it is completely black -Chairman Mao

Those who beat their swords into plowshares often end up plowing for those who kept their swords -someone wise

"If you take a starving dog off the streets and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principle difference between a dog and a man." -Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)

Typically the developer has a contract with the publisher and then the publisher contracts to the distributors. Most Publisher delegate end responsibility for contract breach to the Developer. AKA if Kerb doesn't hold up their end of the bargain, then paradox can shift much of their contractual obligations(read penalties) to Kerberos as Paradox didn't fault(legally speaking). There's also VC contracts, resource shop contracts and many other types of agreements.

Typically the developer has a contract with the publisher and then the publisher contracts to the distributors. Most Publisher delegate end responsibility for contract breach to the Developer. AKA if Kerb doesn't hold up their end of the bargain, then paradox can shift much of their contractual obligations(read penalties) to Kerberos as Paradox didn't fault(legally speaking). There's also VC contracts, resource shop contracts and many other types of agreements.

Yes I understand that, but who there has an incentive to crater sales like this? Wait a little bit and everyone is richer. I handle contract negotiation for all kinds of things, you can always find work arounds if necessary (for a fee). If you cannot you shouldn't have signed that deal in the first place.

Its always darkest right before it is completely black -Chairman Mao

Those who beat their swords into plowshares often end up plowing for those who kept their swords -someone wise

"If you take a starving dog off the streets and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principle difference between a dog and a man." -Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)

Bureaucracy exists so we don't have to think about decisions, not to make the best one everytime. All it takes is one contract holder not wanting anything other than whats written and boom, resources that should be focused on the game are suddenly bogged down in legal. Besides, they already did a month delay, thus making it significantly harder to get everything pushed back again(contract wise).
No its not an ideal situation but things don't always go the way they should.

It would be one thing if the game was just rushed through beta, or didn't have some mai feature implemented. But it is simply unfinished. What could have been so pressing, how much money could have possibly been on the line to lose out on likely thousands of sales and damage the reputation of both companies?

Its always darkest right before it is completely black -Chairman Mao

Those who beat their swords into plowshares often end up plowing for those who kept their swords -someone wise

"If you take a starving dog off the streets and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principle difference between a dog and a man." -Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)

Sunderland, England, United Kingdom, 112404765441676, City of Sunderland

Posts

232

Originally Posted by Becephalus

But who would those contracts have been with? Paradox? Paradox cannot really afford this kind of publicity hit either. They are already fighting a pervasive problem of people staying clear of their games for moths or even years after release. That really really hurts the sales figures.

Microsoft took a big leap between DX9 and DX10 and a lot of it is tightly coupled to the design of the operating system.

Supporting both APIs requires more work because the APIs are not directly compatible. Game engines out there support such things but Kerberos built their own engine. Why they decided they need to is a good question which is linked to my other criticism of them. But given that that was their decision and they had limited resources it only follows that they stick to DX10.

Migrating *down* from DX10 to DX9 btw is not the same thing as migrating up from DX9 to DX10, because powerful features that DX10 provides you with would not be available in DX9. Migrating up from DX9 to DX10 is also not a picnic because large parts of the API were deprecated and one would have to go over the engine code and refactor basically all of it.

The main question is why Kerberos decided they need to build their own game engine when there are plenty of good engines that they could have licensed and the graphic requirements of the game are in essence relatively simple.

Microsoft took a big leap between DX9 and DX10 and a lot of it is tightly coupled to the design of the operating system.

Supporting both APIs requires more work because the APIs are not directly compatible. Game engines out there support such things but Kerberos built their own engine. Why they decided they need to is a good question which is linked to my other criticism of them. But given that that was their decision and they had limited resources it only follows that they stick to DX10.

Migrating *down* from DX10 to DX9 btw is not the same thing as migrating up from DX9 to DX10, because powerful features that DX10 provides you with would not be available in DX9. Migrating up from DX9 to DX10 is also not a picnic because large parts of the API were deprecated and one would have to go over the engine code and refactor basically all of it.

The main question is why Kerberos decided they need to build their own game engine when there are plenty of good engines that they could have licensed and the graphic requirements of the game are in essence relatively simple.

What *other* game engine do you think they could have adapted and used instead? As far as I've ever seen no engine comes close to the MARS2 engine for 3D light rendered combat and the Strategic map. If your taking a 3d combat engine (the tech demo from Nexus 2 for example) you then have to adapt it to fit the SOTS gameplay mechanics of 3 section ships, Battleriders, etc... Then you have to combine it with either a custom made galactic engine or buy yet another engine to handle the empire parts, and get the 2 to work together.

Realistically unless you have a game that already has an engine that is 90% similar to SOTS ][ Mars 2 its quicker to create a new engine than to try and shoehorn features into an existing engine. The only engine that does it all, from memory, would be SOTS prime - others are either RTS (Sins) or Turn based without the 3D combat (Gal Civ) - and ALL of these engines are as old as the SOTS prime engine.

This would be the first new 4X engine in development since that period - with the combination of RTS and Turn based gameplay.

How quaint that one of your staff is willing to apologize, when, by your release of yet ANOTHER ungodly buggy late Alpha Release product as supposedly a "Finished Product" you have already shown us, your buyers, that you having nothing but contempt for us. Yes, I love your games, 6 months after release when they have been properly tested and are sort of debugged... but this sort of behaviour is truly unacceptable from a Computer Software Developer of your size and expertise.

Get it right THE FIRST TIME or DONT RELEASE IT AT ALL !!!!!

What's worse, you are alienating more than 30% of your users who are still on Windows XP when a simple patch that disables whatever stupid feature that DX10 needed would allow them to be able to play. How foolish of you.

So the OP has purchased Europa Universalis III, Europa Universalis: Rome, Vicki: Rev and Hearts of Iron III, and yet he still hasn't figured that Paradox is a somewhat unique publisher/developer and that what has happened is pretty standard fare for Pdox releases. Admittedly, I did not expect this from Kerberos, but any member of THIS gaming community should not be terribly shocked about what happened. Although the game was published in such a poor state that it is even unusual for Pdox, I didn't actually expect the game to really be "done" and enjoyable until it was patched a cupple of times, which is basically exactly what's happening anyway. So even with a poor release, not so much has changed.

Anyway, if you want "get it right the first time or don't release at all" you're propably in the wrong community. Perhaps you should try some mindless, linear FPS, or browser games, not complex strategy games?

Also, by your own admission you too enjoy the games "six months after release" and yet you demand these games should never have been published at all. Well, I disagree, for obvious reasons.

What *other* game engine do you think they could have adapted and used instead? As far as I've ever seen no engine comes close to the MARS2 engine for 3D light rendered combat and the Strategic map. If your taking a 3d combat engine (the tech demo from Nexus 2 for example) you then have to adapt it to fit the SOTS gameplay mechanics of 3 section ships, Battleriders, etc... Then you have to combine it with either a custom made galactic engine or buy yet another engine to handle the empire parts, and get the 2 to work together.

Realistically unless you have a game that already has an engine that is 90% similar to SOTS ][ Mars 2 its quicker to create a new engine than to try and shoehorn features into an existing engine. The only engine that does it all, from memory, would be SOTS prime - others are either RTS (Sins) or Turn based without the 3D combat (Gal Civ) - and ALL of these engines are as old as the SOTS prime engine.

This would be the first new 4X engine in development since that period - with the combination of RTS and Turn based gameplay.

We've confused 3D graphics engines with game engines here. The question of DX9 or DX10 relates to 3D graphics engines. A game engine can be built on top of a different 3D graphics engine or there can be an engine that does both.

Even within the scope of "game engine" there are different shades. For example Creative Assembly might be able to license their engine but you'd only be able to build another "total war" clone with it, or to try and do something else would take a lot of effort and hacking. On the other end of the spectrum there are things like Unity which basically give you a framework to just put your content and game logic into.

From a technical point of view the strategic map is dead simple. It's a rotating / moving camera over a bunch of billboards (stars) that when you zoom in are simple rotating 3D spheres (which all of the same type look the same). So two combines cameras with different object type culling masks and clipping ranges. And over that there is a GUI system and game logic. AI doesn't run in parallel but between turns. So far you could have achieved this with Unity.

The battles themselves are not fundamentally different to any other 3D game, and they have a relatively small number of objects in them. In fact what I always thought was very clever with Sots 1 is how they built a fun and sophisticated battle system over a small number of ships. They didn't try to create massive battles like you can end up with in Total War or Sins of a Solar Empire. As a result the demands from the 3D graphics engine become much more modest.

I'm not sure what you mean by 3D light rendered combat. Lighting is a very basic aspect of any 3D graphics engine. Real-time shadows is a more advanced topic but still very common in modern engines - even Mogre has it. Real-time lighting is even simpler in the Sots environment because there is no ground. The only relevant real-time shadows would be those that ships cast on each other when they pass close to each other (or big projectiles). I didn't manage to get to a combat without the game crashing so I can't comment on if it's using real-time shadows or not. Either way it's not such an advanced topic in 3D graphics and a common feature of any engine out there.

I don't see any part of the battles that is ground breaking or fundamentally different to anything in other 3D games and given that the number of objects in any scene is relatively low you could have implemented this game on top of an FPS game engine.

amirabiri - so a FPS engine would have run the game fine, and required less coding time to transfer than to build the new engine from the ground up?

As the Unreal engine is publically available how long would it take you to convert to a SOTS ][ a like?

I don't know, but if I was starting the Sots 2 project right now the first thing I would have checked is which engines out there I can use, how much they cost and try to estimate how long it would take with each engine. This isn't something anyone can answer on the spot, this is something that in professional software development company spends weeks researching and planning before they embark on a 2 years project of their flag product that will make or break the company.

All of this is however, irrelevant. The exact details of which engine or how long are not needed in order to look at the bigger picture here. We know the degree of what free or licensable game engines today offer, we can see the technical requirements of the game, and broadly speaking there isn't a huge gap there. Building a complete engine from scratch by a small company is a questionable move at best.

So the OP has purchased Europa Universalis III, Europa Universalis: Rome, Vicki: Rev and Hearts of Iron III, and yet he still hasn't figured that Paradox is a somewhat unique publisher/developer

Whats unique is he picked (from what Im hearing) the worst games they made - to buy.
I have no experience with these guys apart from this one an youll have to excuse me but its left a bad taste in my mouth

Whats unique is he picked (from what Im hearing) the worst games they made - to buy.
I have no experience with these guys apart from this one an youll have to excuse me but its left a bad taste in my mouth

You dont know crap so shut up. your negativity in every damn thread here is starting to piss me off.

P.S the worst game they support right now is Supreme ruler 2020 + Cold War

Whats unique is he picked (from what Im hearing) the worst games they made - to buy.
I have no experience with these guys apart from this one an youll have to excuse me but its left a bad taste in my mouth

Largely opinion, but I would have to disagree.
EU:3 is quite good, although late game is rather silly. I do recommend going through the amazing modding community.
EU: Rome, I enjoy the era, the game however I play in spurts and spasms with months in between, mainly because the scope is too small, but the timeline fairly large. Not enough content to keep me in the game and immersed.
Victoria: Rev, a great game, STEEP learning ccurve, and micromanagement hell with the bigger nations such as Russia and the UK.
Hearts of Iron III, I'm till 'meh' on it. I can play a game of it and enjoy though at least.

I joined in with EU3, so I have a fair understanding of the launch history with the games.